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The twentieth century was marked by the proliferation of security regimes, and collective security in particular. Under a collective security arrangement, all states at either a regional or global level agree to resolve their disputes peacefully, collectively oppose acts of aggression, and actively defend those who are victims of such aggression. It is based on the premise that security is indivisible, that is, each state’s security is intricately tied to the security of others, and no nation can be completely secure so long as the territory, independence, and populations of other states are seriously threatened. However, over the past several decades, ethnic conflicts, civil wars, guerrilla insurgencies, and other forms of internal violence have dramatically increased, even as large-scale interstate wars have declined. In addition to these sources of instability and conflict, political repression and extreme human rights abuses by governments against their populations (particularly genocide and ethnic cleansing) often generate massive refugee flows, illegal arms trafficking, and the rise of paramilitary guerrilla armies, all of which could disrupt neighboring states and regional stability. Thus, the concept of security adopted by international and regional regimes over the past few decades has expanded from the threat and use of force for deterrence and enforcement to include nation- and state-building, peacekeeping, and peace-making.

Dramatic changes in the way the public acquires information and formulates its attitudes have potentially altered the opinion and foreign policy relationship. While traditional approaches have treated public opinion on domestic and foreign matters as largely distinct, the culmination of a series of changes may eliminate the effective distinction between foreign and domestic policy, at least in terms of how the American political system operates. All the factors central to the opinion and foreign policy process, such as information acquisition, attitude formation, media effects, the effect of opinion on policy, and presidential leadership now appear to mirror the processes observed at the domestic level. This analysis reviews historical trends in the literature on public opinion and foreign policy that has focused on the rationality of the public’s opinions, the structure of its attitudes, and its influence on foreign policymaking. The traditional Almond-Lippmann consensus portrayed an emotional public with unstructured attitudes and little influence on foreign policy; however, revisionist views have described a reasonable public with largely structured views on foreign policy that can, at times, constrain and even drive those policies. More recently, the rise of “intermestic” issues, contain both domestic and international elements, such as globalization, inequality, terrorism, immigration, and climate change, have interacted to transform the domestic and international context. The bulk of this analysis highlights emerging new research directions that should be pursued in light of the changes. First, scholars should continue to evaluate the “who thinks what and why” questions with particular attention to differences between high- and low-information individuals, the effect of misinformation, and information sources. In doing so, research should build on research from non-American contexts that points to the important influences of societal and institutional factors. In addition to continued examination of traditional demographic factors such as partisanship and ideology, additional attention should turn to consider potential genetic and biological foundations of attitudes. Finally, researchers should continue to evaluate how the new media environment, including social media, affects how the public accesses information, how the media provides information, and how political elites attempt to shape both. Given these changes, scholars should consider whether it continues to make sense to treat public opinion dynamics regarding foreign policy as distinct from domestic policy and its implications.

The study of East Asian foreign policies has progressed in sync with mainstream international relations (IR) theories: (1) from perhaps an inadvertent or unconscious coincidence with realism during the Cold War to consciously using different theoretical tools to study the various aspects of East Asian foreign policies; and (2) from the dominance of realism to a diversity of theories in studying East Asian foreign policies. Nonetheless, the old issues from the Cold War have not been resolved; the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Strait remain two flashpoints in the region, with new twists that can derail regional stability and prosperity. New issues also have emerged and made East Asia most volatile. One issue is concerned with restructuring the balance of power in East Asia, particularly the dynamics among the major players, i.e. Japan, China, and the United States. Regionalism is another new topic in the study of East Asian foreign policies. A review of the current state of the field suggests that two complementary issues be given priority in the future. First, the foreign policy interests and strategies of individual small states vis-à-vis great powers in the region, particularly those in Southeast Asia and the Korean peninsula. Second, what could really elevate the study of East Asian foreign policies in the general field of IR and foreign policy analysis is to continue exploring innovative analytical frameworks that can expand the boundaries of existing metatheories and paradigms.

Autonomy is a concept constantly referred to in Latin American foreign policy analysis, especially with respect to Argentina and Brazil. As great powers continue to exert effective control over peripheral economies and their political decision making, autonomy emerges as a possibility for self-determination in the areas where hegemonic powers’ economic, political, and cultural interferences are expressed. Although this is not a new concept, the quest for autonomy within the “global periphery”—and elsewhere too—still remains relevant. Helio Jaguaribe and Juan Carlos Puig’s theoretical approaches are fundamental epistemological contributions to international relations (IR), not only in South America (where the theoretical approach was first developed) but also to the wider IR field outside the mainstream scholarship. In line with global historical changes, autonomy took on some subsequent new meanings, which led to new and heterogeneous formulations that transformed, and in certain cases also contradicted, the very genesis of the idea of autonomy. As a result, the so-called autonomy “with adjectives” emerged within IR peripheral debates. The 21st century witnessed the rebirth of the concept amid the rise of multilateralism and the new Latin American regionalism, which brought its relational character to the fore. Some of the new approaches to autonomy, especially from Brazil, used the concept as a methodological tool to understand the historical evolution of the country’s foreign policy. As such, autonomy and its theoretical reflection remain central to the analyses and interpretations of the international relations of peripheral countries, and it is in this sense that the autonomy can be highlighted broadly as a Latin American contribution to IR discipline. The concept of autonomy has a unique and foundational content referred to the discussion of the asymmetries in the global order. Studying autonomy is critical to understanding peripheral countries’ problems and dynamics.

Like the contested remembrance of historical events, collective memory shapes interstate relations, foreign and security policy, and global politics. International relations (IR) scholars studying the relationship between collective memory and international politics link the memory concept to the notions of security, power, language, emotions, gender, identity, trauma, justice, law, and the like. The study of the international politics of memory relies on a plurality of theoretical approaches gained from interdisciplinary works on collective memory. Although collective memory is viewed as a variable influencing foreign policymaking in structural terms within a positivist paradigm in IR scholarship, from an interpretive perspective, collective memory is a practice of remembrance that constitutes a state’s foreign and security policy. Following the advances of the interpretive paradigm in the social sciences, it is expected that more interpretive studies on the international politics of memory will appear. .

During the first decade of the 21st century, the international system underwent a process of transformation in which emerging actors gained prominence, promoting a new stage that enabled the resurgence of South–South cooperation (SSC). The field of international relations approached this phenomenon mainly through studies of international development cooperation, but also from a foreign policy analysis approach. Although at the beginning of the century attention was focused especially on emerging countries like China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, among others, the consolidation of SSC between middle-income countries, particularly in Latin America, gave rise to a broad debate on the distinct identities of the Southern partners. Considering the substantial literature produced, and emphasizing a perspective rooted in Latin America, SSC is analyzed with the goals of contributing to understand SSC from its conceptual formulation, link SSC to foreign policy considerations, and, finally, understand how SSC has affected the International Development Cooperation System.

The study of foreign policy of Colombia has traditionally followed a path of thick description of specific events and generalizations that have transcended from one generation to another. There is a tendency to claim that Colombia’s foreign policy is presidentialist or personalist, of low profile, and excessively pro-American. These are just a few examples of the conventional wisdom that has defined the study of Colombian foreign policy. Although the field of foreign policy analysis is only in its preliminary phase in Colombia, there is a growing interest among students and scholars to analytically examine foreign policy decision-making through multiple levels of analysis. The foreign policy of Colombia is best understood by tracing the direction and alignment of specific foreign policy decisions into respices, meaning “look at” or “upon.” The fact that Colombia has traditionally “looked upon” a foreign entity to formulate foreign policy poses different questions regarding how autonomous foreign policymaking in Colombia really is. On the one hand, the essence of Colombia’s foreign policy has traditionally been found in a juxtaposition of the country’s interests alongside those of the United States. On the other hand, as a consequence of the articulation of this foreign policy partnership between Colombia and the United States, security has been the most recurrent topic in Colombia’s foreign policy agenda-setting, given the problems of illicit drugs, armed conflict, terrorism, and, more recently, peace.

Formal diplomatic recognition of “middle powers” began with the Congress of Vienna, but the concept gained increasing currency after World War II because medium-sized countries like Canada used it to distinguish themselves from smaller states and secure a relatively favorable position in the postwar order. Early definitions of middle powers focused on states that lacked the system-wide influence of great powers but whose resources and capacities were recognized as being more significant than those of small states. The term’s exact meaning remains contested, but early definitions capture three important dimensions of the concept. First, it is inherently relational, from both a material perspective and a social perspective, and often used as a residual category. Some scholars define middle-power status using material factors like geographic size or population, while others emphasize social roles and recognition, but all of these approaches focus on a state’s position, roles, and status relative to other states. Second, the middle-power concept is both state-centric and practitioner-adjacent. National policymakers invoke, reify, and continually reinvent the concept to achieve specific foreign policy objectives. Third, the middle-power concept is bound up with wider debates about global order. Middle powers were long conceptualized as good international citizens and champions of the liberal world order. The rise of “emerging” middle powers raises questions about their orientation toward existing global institutions. Going forward, the most pressing questions about middle powers and their foreign policy behavior will be linked to broader conversations about geopolitical change and the future of contemporary global governance arrangements.

Public opinion has been part of US foreign relations in two key ways. As one would expect in a democracy, the American public has shaped the foreign policy of its government. No less significantly, the United States has sought to influence foreign public opinion as a tool of its diplomacy, now known as public diplomacy. The US public has also been a target of foreign attempts at influence with varying degrees of success. While analysis across the span of US history reveals a continuity of issues and approaches, issues of public opinion gained unprecedented salience in the second decade of the 21st century. This salience was not matched by scholarship.

International agreements on environmental issues are the result of the coordination of states’ foreign policies. To understand the international politics of the environment requires attention to the institutional, social, economic, and cognitive factors that determine foreign policies. Although nearly every foreign policy bears on environmental concerns, the focus is on the policies that states adopt centered on humanity’s relationship to the natural world and ecology. Scholarship on environmental policy and foreign policy has not developed distinctive schools of thought. However, organizing scholarship according to a theoretically grounded typology reveals affinities among various scholarly works: systemic, societal, and state-centric approaches can be grouped according to whether they emphasize power, interests, or cognitive factors. Most studies of environmental foreign policy are oriented toward problem solving—identifying discrete problems in existing institutional arrangements and pointing toward solutions to these problems that do not question the institutions fundamentally. This orientation may not be adequate if crossing planetary boundaries leads to environmental challenges so severe that current institutions cannot cope. Climate change poses just such a challenge, and the rising concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere means a future crisis is predictable. Thus, scholars might be best advised to orient toward critical theory, which seeks feasible alternatives to existing arrangements. The study of foreign policy toward the environment would be most useful in helping scholars and policy makers to identify and surmount barriers to transformational changes that would enable humanity to cope with future environmental crisis.

Great powers have traditionally played a major role in the study of foreign policy. From a variety of work on foreign policy analysis, it is known that great powers are more active in their foreign policy than other states in the international system are. Whether the actions are disbursing foreign aid, creating alliances, conflict involvement, or others, studies will often control for great power status, with the underlying expectation being that major powers will be more likely to utilize these foreign policy tools. In fact, when considering relevant dyads in quantitative studies of foreign policy analysis, states have to be contiguous for the dyad to be considered relevant, but an exception is made for dyads containing at least one major power, given the ability of great powers to project their power beyond their borders. Key literature on the foreign policy behavior of great powers discusses different ways of defining great powers. In particular, the debate over defining great power status has focused on whether a great power should be defined solely on its physical capabilities, or also on intangible factors, such as its foreign policy interests or whether the state is recognized as a great power by others in the international system. Further, there are questions of whether great powers have to be military powers or whether economic superiority is enough to classify a state as a great power. There is also the issue of regional powers: states that are clearly military, economic, and political leaders within a limited geographic region, but not at the global level. Should these states be considered great powers, or should that classification be reserved for global powers? The literature on great-power foreign policy also discusses cooperative and conflictual behaviors of great powers in the international system. It addresses great power war, focusing on how they are more conflict prone than minor powers, and reviews the issues that drive great powers to engage in conflict, such as positional issues and the intent to shape the international system to their liking. It also discusses a variety of foreign policy actions, both coercive and cooperative, that major powers are more likely to engage in than their minor-power counterparts. In addition, there is much work done on the relationships between great powers and between great powers and minor powers, stressing the competitive nature of major-power interactions and the trade-off between economic and military security and policy concessions that defines major-minor power interactions.

In recent years, significant effort has been applied to understanding and empirically testing the concept of policy entrepreneurship in a range of different settings. Despite these efforts, studies to date have tended to focus on policy entrepreneurs in domestic policy settings. Few have articulated the potential role that policy entrepreneurs play in understanding foreign policy decision-making. Coupled with theories and evidence from the field of foreign policy analysis, the concept of policy entrepreneurship lends itself to analyzing how actors in the foreign policy space draw attention to problems, advance workable proposals, and link outcomes to symbolic values. This article introduces and applies a framework for the analysis of policy entrepreneurs seeking to influence foreign policy decision-making. This framework is then used to underpin illustrative case studies of foreign policy entrepreneurs. The variety of recent scholarly contributions regarding policy entrepreneurs and foreign policy suggests that many more opportunities exist for such work to be conducted in the future. This is an exciting prospect. Valuable, generalizable insights are more likely to emerge from such a collective research enterprise if the various individual contributions are informed by greater conceptual coherence.

As a transdisciplinary puzzle, between international relations and public policy, foreign policy analysis (FPA) owes much to the study of decision-making processes and its early pioneers (Richard Snyder, James Rosenau, Harold and Margaret Sprout . . . ). Formulated and implemented by state agents, foreign policy fully belongs to the field of public policy studies, whose approaches have proved relevant to analyze its formulation. Still, it remains singular for several reasons. In constant interdependence with extraterritorial and mostly unpredictable actors or events, it is more reactive (or at least less proactive) than most domestic policies. Vulnerable to various transnational linkages, foreign policy also leads the analyst to rethink several pillars of public policy studies, such as the role of public opinion, the nature of elites, or the feasibility of evaluation. Its implementation, in particular, depends on the leeway resulting from foreign processes initiated in remote states or societies. Because what is at stake is national identity, reputation, or status, the national interest, and war and peace, the possibility of nonrational, psychologically biased, or even passionate responses to a political problem is higher. The emergence of nonstate actors (nongovernmental organizations, companies, religious groups), substate entities (regions, federated states), and suprastate organizations in international politics is a compelling factor that urges us to rethink foreign policy as public policy. The fading boundaries between domestic and international dimensions, as well as between public and private strategies, have a deep impact on the analysis. The theorization and practice of new kinds of policy networks are likely to be at the heart of future research agendas, both in international relations and public policy studies.

The European Union (EU), following its 2004 big bang enlargement toward the central and eastern European countries Cyprus and Malta found itself facing a new group of neighboring countries (i.e., new borders). In response, the EU devised a new policy, the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), adopted in 2004, which encompasses two different geographical regions for the EU’s 16 neighbors: Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Belarus in the East and Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, and Tunisia in the South Mediterranean. The ENP aimed to promote political and economic transformation in the EU’s periphery and stabilize the European borders with its key instruments. To do so, Association Agreements together with Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreements, Action Plans, Partnership Priorities, and Single Support Frameworks were adopted. The ENP was revised twice, in 2011 and in 2015, to respond to the ongoing challenges that the EU and its neighboring countries face. The ENP’s evolution included multicountry, regional plans, the Union for the Mediterranean and the Eastern Partnership, adopted in 2008 and 2009, respectively. The ENP’s effectiveness could be assessed in terms of its ability to stabilize the EU’s neighbouring countries, as well as in promoting political, economic, and governance-related reforms. The ENP’s revisions with the “more for more/less for principle” in 2011 and a stronger EU presence in the region in 2015 with the emphasis on building “resilience” rather than diffusion of European norms and rules were all adopted to enable the realization of its main objectives. However, the variation among the partner countries, the domestic scope conditions, and scope conditions such as the EU’s vertical and horizontal policy incoherence, coupled with the presence of other international actors, constrained the ENP’s effectiveness. The ENP as an attempt to create a “ring of friends” around the EU failed to realize its objectives, and instead the EU is surrounded now with a “ring of fire.”

Realists explain foreign policy in terms of power politics. They disagree on the exact meaning of power and on how and to what extent politics is likely to influence policy. But they all find that power has a strong materialist component and that the influence of domestic politics on foreign policy is likely to vary with security challenges stemming from the external environment. The relative size of a state’s material resources is likely to influence its ability to set agendas and influence specific decisions and outcomes in international affairs. And the nature of the strategic environment, most importantly whether the security and survival of the state is under immediate threat, is likely to influence the relative weight of domestic influences on foreign policy. In sum, great powers enjoy a bigger external action space in their foreign policies than weaker states, and secure states enjoy a bigger external action space in their foreign policies than insecure states. Realism is a top-down approach to explaining foreign policy. Realists begin from the anarchic structure of the international system. They argue that the absence of a legitimate monopoly of power in the international system create a strong incentive for states to focus on survival as their primary goal and self-help as the most important means to achieving this goal. However, “survival” and “self-help” may take many forms. These forms are shaped by mechanisms of socialization and competition in the international system and systemic incentives are filtered through the perceptions of foreign policy decision makers and domestic institutions enabling and restraining the ability of decision makers to respond to external incentives. Neoclassical realists combine these factors in order to explain specific foreign policies. Offensive realists and defensive realists focus on the effects of structure on foreign policy, but with contrasting assumptions about the typical behavior of states: defensive realists expect states to pursue balancing policies, whereas offensive realists argue that only by creating an imbalance of power in its own favor will a state be able to maximize its security. In addition to being an analytical approach for explaining foreign policy, realists often serve as foreign policy advisors or act in the function of public intellectuals problematizing and criticizing foreign policy. This illustrates the potential for realism as an analytical, problem-solving and critical approach to foreign policy analysis. However, it also shows the strains within realism between ambitions of creating general theories, explaining particular foreign policies, and advising on how to make prudent foreign policy decisions.

The role of foreign correspondent has long been prominent in journalism but is undergoing considerable change. While many in this role are considered elite, and have a very high profile, others practice their reporting in anonymous and sometimes precarious conditions. Prominent types of foreign correspondent are the capital correspondent, bureau chief, and conflict correspondent. Conflict correspondents can, in turn, be categorized into three main types depending on how they perceive their role: the propagandist; the recorder of history; and the moralist. The role of foreign correspondent has been the subject of a great deal of research, including analyses of news content focused on the nature of bias and story selection and framing in international reporting, and observational and interview-based studies of practitioners of the role. Research has sought to shift the focus from elite correspondents for international media organizations to the myriad local media professionals who play an increasing role in shaping international news stories; to the move toward social media as a newsgathering and news-dissemination tool; to the safety of journalists—as their work becomes increasingly imperiled around the world; and to the vital but largely hidden role of news agencies in shaping international news.

The European Union (EU) was created through treaties and thus is a product of international law. In the Van Gend en Loos decision, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) stated that the EU was a “new order of international law” and reiterated this in subsequent decisions. This perspective is consistent with the way that the EU influences international law to drive integration as well as its foreign policy goals to become a global leader in the rule of law, protection of human rights, and environmental stability while at the same time decreasing the sovereignty of Member States without their agreement. The CJEU is adjudicating a supranational constitution and empowering national courts to ensure the consistency of EU law. The EU has demonstrated that a unique international system can be driven through cooperation and confidence in international law. While creating possibilities for both international and the EU, it also creates challenges for the national court as well as EU and international law development.

The earliest scholarly writing on “cyberpolitics” focused mainly on the domestic sphere, but it became clear by the mid-2000s that the Internet-generated “cyberspace” was also having massive effects on the broader dynamics and patterns of international politics. A great deal of the early research on this phenomenon focused on the way cyberspace might empower nonstate actors of all varieties. In many respects that has been the case, but states have increasingly asserted their “cyberpower” in a variety of ways. Some scholars even predict a coming territorialization of what was initially viewed as a technology that fundamentally resisted the dictates of sovereign borders. Such disparate possibilities speak to the ambiguity surrounding the intersection of the international system and the political affordances generated by the Internet and related technologies. Does cyberpolitics challenge the international system as we know it—perhaps altering the very nature of war, sovereignty, and the state itself—or will it merely be subsumed within some structurally mandated logic of state-centric self-help? As might be expected, research that speaks to such foundational questions is quite sprawling. It is also still somewhat inchoate because the object of study is complex and highly malleable. The cyber-“domain” involves a physical substrate ostensibly subject to a territorially demarcated international system, but Internet-enabled activities have expanded rapidly and unpredictably over the past few decades because it also involves a virtual superstructure designed to be a network of networks, and so fundamentally at odds with centralized control. As such, some argue that because cyberspace has so enmeshed itself into all aspects of society, international politics and cyberspace should be seen as coevolving systems, and concomitantly that fields such as International Relations (IR) must update their theoretical and methodological tools. Such contentions indicate that an understanding of extra-domestic cyberpolitics has not so much involved progressively developing insights as differing perspectives compete to explain reality, but rather the growing recognition that we are only now catching up to a rapidly changing reality. As part of that recognition, much of the cutting-edge International Studies (IS) work on cyberpolitics is aimed at researching how the central actor in global politics, the state, is increasingly a cyberpolitical actor. This has meant the abandonment of strong assertions about the way cyberspace would exist separate from the “real world” of state interaction, or that it would force the alteration of especially hierarchical forms of state power. Instead, burgeoning literatures examine the myriad ways states seek to resist and control cyberpolitical activity by others, deploy their own cyberpolitical power, and even shape the very cyberspace in which all of this can occur. This focus on “international cyberpolitics” thus involves tracking a complex and growing milieu of practices, all while reflecting on the possibly fundamental changes being forced upon the international system. All of this points to the likelihood that the study of international politics will increasingly also be the study of international cyberpolitics.

Much of the literature on ethnic lobby groups comes from either research on interest groups or ethnicity that looks to foreign policy cases, or foreign policy analysis studies that focus on the role of interest groups or ethnic groups. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a burst of scholarly activity regarding ethnic interest group activism in US foreign policy, following the changes in American society and in the US Congress that emerged from the wake of Watergate, Vietnam, and the civil rights movement. Later, the end of the Cold War brought a new burst of ethnic lobbying on foreign policy, and a new wave of scholarly attention to these issues. During both of these bursts of attention, studies predominantly focused on the activities of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which was often seen as an exception to the rule that interest groups are not very significant forces in the foreign policy sphere. Another source of research on ethnic issues and foreign policy is the emerging literature on ethnicity, the construction thereof, and the political development of ethnic communities over time. The three basic issues that stand out in the literature about ethnic lobbying on foreign policy include the formation of ethnic interest groups, the roots of ethnic interest group success, and whether ethnic lobbies actually capture policy in their respective areas, at least in the context of US foreign policy. Meanwhile, the two level game perspective and the competition among ethnic groups needs further exploration.

Public opinion has long been associated with diplomacy. The earliest records of public involvement in diplomacy are available from the city-states of ancient Greece, where diplomats in the Greek city-states were chosen by public assemblies following thorough public deliberations. However, the growth of a sense of professional community among diplomats following the rise of foreign ministries led to a gradual structuring of the communication patterns. Most generally, a cleavage started to appear between modes of communication in relation to actors within the professional community and in relation to actors outside it. Within the diplomatic community, communication followed the rules, norms, and procedures of emerging diplomatic practice and ceremony. Outside the diplomatic community, the patterns that emerged can be conceptualized along two paths: (1) information gathering, and (2) informing the public at home and abroad about foreign policy. Modern professional diplomacy has been seeking to strike a balance between limiting public access to diplomatic processes and trying to communicate with the public with the aim of generating a public opinion favorable to government foreign policy. The current information-intensive global environment poses a challenge to foreign ministries’ institutionalized mode of limited public communication along two dimensions: the rising importance of so-called public diplomacy, and the increasing need for public legitimization of foreign policy decisions.